Dream ticket 2008

[Capt. Bo of the WTF co.]

And the winners of the 2008 presidential nominations for the peoples choice party...

They got my vote!

Bo

[Silkie McDonough]

OMG!

[BriarRose Kildare]

so wrong, but so true....

thanks for the laugh.

[Ransom]

[Red Cat Jenny]

Yeah that sums it up alright...

[Rumba Rue]

Best representation I've seen in a long time!

[Bully MacGraw]

Good photo shop work. BUT does every one on the forum really feel that way about the three Senators?

[lady snow]

i still support team of snoopy and woodstock

[Capt. Bo of the WTF co.]

"Good photo shop work. BUT does every one on the forum really feel that way about the three Senators?"

Youre right, that was a terrible thing to do. Moe, Curly, Larry, please forgive me. I won't insult you guys like that again.

"i still support team of snoopy and woodstock"

But I cannot understand anything the bird says.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bo

[lady snow]

and you understand all the words the pols are saying?

[Capt. Bo of the WTF co.]

OUCH! You got me with that one!

Bo

[Misson]

Good photo shop work.  BUT does every one on the forum really feel that way about the three Senators?

No. But if we were to take it seriously, it would lead to a harangue that would probably pointlessly produce nothing but ill will. You don't usually have much luck changing people's minds in political discussions. Politics is a funny thing. Emory University did a fascinating study where they had people read statements by two presidential candidates and some neutral people (Bush, Kerry and Tom Hanks are mentioned.) The documents contained self-contradicting statements by each of them. From Emory's news release on the study:

"Next, partisans were asked to consider the discrepancy, and then to rate the extent to which the person's words and deeds were contradictory. Finally, they were presented with an exculpatory statement that might explain away the apparent contradiction, and asked to reconsider and again rate the extent to which the target's words and deeds were contradictory.

Behavioral data showed a pattern of emotionally biased reasoning: partisans denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate that they had no difficulty detecting in the opposing candidate. Importantly, in both their behavioral and neural responses, Republicans and Democrats did not differ in the way they responded to contradictions for the neutral control targets, such as Hanks, but Democrats responded to Kerry as Republicans responded to Bush.

While reasoning about apparent contradictions for their own candidate, partisans showed activations throughout the orbital frontal cortex, indicating emotional processing and presumably emotion regulation strategies. There also were activations in areas of the brain associated with the experience of unpleasant emotions, the processing of emotion and conflict, and judgments of forgiveness and moral accountability."

So the study finds we are wired to support what we want to believe. (That seems intuitively obvious to me, but here's a nice study to support it.)

The best thing I've heard on the political brain was in a podcast from a Radio Australia program called All in the Mind that was done on Nov 17, 2007. (That's where I first came across the above study.) You can read the transcript here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stor...007/2089172.htm

The most fascinating bit was the method most people use to decide their voting strategy. I'll quote the transcript so as not to get it wrong. According to Drew Westen, a Professor of Psychology at Emory University:

"The four biggest predictors of people's voting behaviour are first and foremost their feelings towards the parties and their principles. The second is their gut level feelings about the person who's running, the third is their feelings towards that person's personal attributes like strength and empathy and leadership and every once in a while competence. And then finally, last but quite least is their feelings about the candidate's position on issues. So if you start from that bottom of the hierarchy you're actually not going to do a very good job of winning hearts and minds."

Positions run dead last! This is why arguing politics with most people is pointless. However, posting funny pictures of the race sort of puts us all at the same footing - most people can appreciate the humor of such a picture. Most people haven't been able to take politicos seriously since Watergate gave us a tangible reason for not trusting them. (Curiously, such things had been reported and discovered in the past, but they never really took hold until Watergate. This probably has a lot to do with the status quo discontentment which was so readily embraced by the Baby Boom generation.)